ruminations

I discovered freehg.org today, which is a free mercurial repo hosting site. In spirit it’s very akin to github, but obviously lacks many of the features and much of the polish. However, this particular purpose, it’s more than sufficient.

If you access many *nix machines on a regular basis, you’ve probably have been annoyed that your custom configuration files are not immediately available. I used to scp config files around all the time, but that gold old quick. I’m going to show you my current setup for making sure that all the dotfiles (zshrc, vimrc, etc) that I use are version controlled and are easily accessible.

First, collect all your dotfiles in one directory and make it an hg repository. I use ~/.dotfiles, you can use whatever you like.  Here is what my .dotfiles looks like:

iapetus:~/.dotfiles> ls -l
total 54k
-rw-r--r-- 1 yqiang staff   85 2008-07-04 10:20 ackrc
-rw-r--r-- 1 yqiang staff   50 2008-05-29 18:24 bash_profile
-rw-r--r-- 1 yqiang staff 2.0k 2008-05-29 18:24 bashrc
-rw-r--r-- 1 yqiang staff  569 2008-07-04 14:09 create_symlinks.py
drwx------ 3 yqiang staff  102 2008-06-13 15:52 gtk-2.0
-rw-r--r-- 1 yqiang staff  624 2008-07-04 09:48 gvimrc
-rw-r--r-- 1 yqiang staff   48 2008-06-17 15:46 hgignore
-rw-r--r-- 1 yqiang staff  454 2008-07-04 10:30 hgrc
drwx------ 5 yqiang staff  170 2008-06-29 17:55 irssi
-rw-r--r-- 1 yqiang staff  403 2008-06-22 11:20 pdbrc
-rw-r--r-- 1 yqiang staff  642 2008-06-29 10:49 screenrc
-rw-r--r-- 1 yqiang staff 6.8k 2008-07-04 13:39 vimrc
-rw-r--r-- 1 yqiang staff 5.8k 2008-06-29 17:43 zshrc

Then create a freehg.org account and initialize a public repo there. You can find mine at:

http://freehg.org/u/yqiang/dotfiles/

Now, when you access a new machine, to get all your dotfiles in order, just do:

veritas:~ > hg clone http://freehg.org/u/yqiang/dotfiles/ .dotfiles
requesting all changes
adding changesets
adding manifests
adding file changes
added 22 changesets with 37 changes to 15 files
15 files updated, 0 files merged, 0 files removed, 0 files unresolved
veritas:~ > cd .dotfiles
veritas:~/.dotfiles > python create_symlinks.py
Symlinking /home/yqiang/.dotfiles/zshrc to /home/yqiang/.zshrc
Symlinking /home/yqiang/.dotfiles/gvimrc to /home/yqiang/.gvimrc
Symlinking /home/yqiang/.dotfiles/bash_profile to /home/yqiang/.bash_profile
Symlinking /home/yqiang/.dotfiles/hgignore to /home/yqiang/.hgignore
Symlinking /home/yqiang/.dotfiles/bashrc to /home/yqiang/.bashrc
Symlinking /home/yqiang/.dotfiles/hgrc to /home/yqiang/.hgrc
Symlinking /home/yqiang/.dotfiles/pdbrc to /home/yqiang/.pdbrc
Symlinking /home/yqiang/.dotfiles/ackrc to /home/yqiang/.ackrc
Symlinking /home/yqiang/.dotfiles/screenrc to /home/yqiang/.screenrc
Symlinking /home/yqiang/.dotfiles/vimrc to /home/yqiang/.vimrc

create_symlink.py is a simple python script that will create the symlinks for you. Here is the code for it:

#!/usr/bin/env python
import os
home = os.path.abspath(os.environ['HOME'])
path = os.path.join(home, '.dotfiles')
excludes = ['gtk-2.0', 'create_symlinks.py']
for f in os.listdir(path):
    if f.startswith('.'):
        continue
    if f not in excludes:
        dst = os.path.join(home, '.' + f)
        src = os.path.abspath(f)
        try:
            print "Symlinking %s to %s" % (src, dst)
            os.symlink(src, dst)
        except Exception, msg:
            print "Failed to symlink %s to %s " % (src, dst)
            print msg

Tada. All your config files are in place now. If you’re really into it, you can run a cron script that automatically does an hg pull so you don’t even have to think about it.